50 Years Ago: The Beatles Hit U.S. Airwaves

On Dec. 17, 1963, the U.S. still had no idea what was in store. The Beatles had yet to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show where they seemingly overnight changed the landscape of pop music forever. That wouldn't occur until February 1964. However on a mid-December day in 1963, Carroll James of WWDC in Washington, DC played a Beatles record. He wasn't the first to do so in America, but it was the first time things really caught fire.

According to Beatles Interviews.com, a DC teenager had mailed in a request to WWDC to hear the Beatles. "I wrote that I thought they would be really popular here, and if he (James) could get one of their records, that would really be great," said Marsha Albert, that insightful teen who made the request. James got his hands on the band's new single, 'I Want to Hold Your Hand,' which had yet to be issued in America. The phones lit up and made the song an instant listener favorite. Capitol released the single here in the States the following week and it would ultimately hit the number one slot on Billboard on Feb. 1, 1964, a place it would occupy for eleven straight weeks.

A month earlier (Nov. 18), the Beatles made their first appearance on American television as part of the 'Huntley-Brinkley Report,' which featured a four-minute segment by reporter Edwin Newman. Three weeks before that, on Oct. 29, the Washington Post ran a story with the headline, 'Thousands of Britons 'Riot' – Liverpool Sound Stirs Up Frenzy.' Both Time and Newsweek ran their own Beatles stories in mid-November. In other words, the times they were a changin' and the rest, quite obviously, is history.